Two eyes, a nose and a mouth -- a simple configuration that has inspired artists for centuries. Today, when technology is doing much of the looking, portraits have taken on a whole new significance. We cannot look away from the overwhelming intervention of facial recognition systems in our lives or how this ability to match one human with a database of faces is poised to destroy our sense of privacy, our sense of selves. In contrast, portraiture in now at the forefront of figurative painting, perhaps as a weapon against the dehumanization of such technology. More likely, in this age of selfies and celebrity, artists seek to go beyond the aesthetic limitations of social media and mass production. Their paintings revive old traditions of looking at each other to make connections, not draw comparisons. 

This exhibition is titled Facial Recognition because its artists transform the image of a face into new experimental forms, often beyond easily legibility. These artists explore a range of options for portraying a subject, rather than merely elevating the famous or exploiting the beautiful. They take advantage of this moment when art history allows the portrait to accomplish many things, not least of which is to expand aesthetic considerations. Using the face as a canvas, each artist takes liberties with reality and transforms the simple formula of eyes, nose, ears and mouth into a launchpad for exciting experiments. each artist has their own unique approach to this challenge, from Walter Robinson's appropriation of couples from pulp fiction novels to Yukimasa Ida's abstract brushstrokes reconfiguring what a face can be. 

Can you recognize anyone in these paintings? Would they recognize you? A panopticon faces viewers in this rogue's gallery and it is up to each individual to determine which is the most imaginative. Is it the cartoons of Victoria Nunley, reminiscent of  1960s cocktail napkins and Japanese prints? Or is it the colored pencil drawings of sports heroes by self-taught prodigy Julian Pace? Like Nunley, Agrela Angeles also concentrates on female subjects, but for her, every woman is a heroine, claiming our attention with their bright colors and surrealistic forms. Similarly, Alic Brock's painted composites are ironic takes on celebrity, slapping back when we look closely to compare his subjects to movie stars. And there's Adam Parker Smith, whose sculptures inspired by ancient Greek statutes, yet hear the marble appears to be folded into a cube. 

Portraits, once a luxury for elites, are now available to everyone ho owns a camera or a cellphone, So, it is the job of painters and sculptors to demonstrate how a face can authenticate our humanity or give dignity to the underrecognized. Those are worthwhile issues, but not the primary concerns of the artists in this show. This group, or at least many in this group, approach the face with paint brushes loaded with irony, eater to make ufn of those looking for meaning in these playful configurations. That is true of all but Yukimasa Ida who throws himself into compositions packed with emotions where paint barely contains the psychological trauma of his subjects. With a wide range of talent on view, Facial Recognition offers a sampling of important trends in contemporary portraiture. By taking in the enormous possibilities of this simple task -painting a human face- the show also goes a long way in convincing even the skeptical that portraiture is one of the 21st century's most important art genres. Eyes, nose, mouth - a simple construct that has led to so many investigations!

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Artist Information

Francis Annan Affotey was born in 1985 in Accra, Ghana. He graduated from Accra's Ghanatta College of Art and Design, winning three of the school's five top awards -- for still life, imagination and composition, and abstract drawing, later joining the Revolution Art Organization and the African Young Artist Orgnaization. The portraits of the Ghanaian artist are bold portrayals of his subjects' inner worlds- captured through their expressive eyes, accentuated forms, and rich colorings, painted in his characteristically realistic style heightened through the use of electric hues against more seductive ombres. His fascination with the unique experiences of his family, classmates, celebrities and models is expressed through their powerful expressions and their body language. 

Born in Úbeda, Spain, in 1966. Ángeles Agrela currently lives and works in Granada. Her paintings are a refutation to the canons of art history, inserting bold female figures into a dialogue that was often soley male. Seeing her career recently revived, Agrela has been granted various awards including the BMW Painting Prize in 2015, the Plastic Arts Prize of the Regional Government of Cantabria in 2010 among others. 

Born in 1992 in Dayton Ohio, Alic Brock is a self-taught artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Working with ultra-precision in his airbrush technique, Brock "chops and screws" his subject matter, taking iconic images that he finds online and manipulating them first with computer software and then in real-life, skewing his stencils to create an enchanting uneasiness in his paintings. Alic favors pop-culture icons like basketball players and musicians, but he doesn't shy away from art-historic subjects.

Yukimasa Ida, born in 1990 in Totori, Japan, obtained his masters in oil painting from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019. He now lives and works in Tokyo. Blurring the idstinction between figuration and abstraction, he creates ambiguous faces by applying oil paint thickly to enormous canvases. He has exhibited across Japan, and abroad in Europe at spaces including Perrotin Gallery (Paris, France), Fabien Fryns Fine Art (London, U.K.) and Kaikai Kiki Gallery (Tokyo, Japan). Ida won the CAF Special Jury Award (2016). and the Arts in Marunouchi Grand Prix (2015). 

Born in 1991 in New Jersey, Victoria Nunley earned her MFA from Boston University in 2018. She has since exhibited her hilarious and witty paintings in pretigious galleries across the U.S. These almost cartoon-like canvases place women front-and-center, often tomboys happy to enjoy the benefits of once-male privilege.

Julian Pace was born in 1988 in Seattle, Washington. His pop-historical portraits reflect his experiences living in Florence, where he was based for six years, and New York, where he currently resides. A completely self-taught artist, his world is populated by behemoths of art history, pop culture and sports. These drawings are made instantly recognizable not by their face of the celebrity but by Pace's entirely unique approach to coloration and perspective. 

Walter Robinson was born in 1950 in Wilmington, DE. He grew up in Tulsa, OK, and moved to New York City to attend college at Columbia University. In 1973 he co-founded Art-Rite magazine, which featured covers designed by artists and was distributed free of charge in New York galleries. At the same time, he began working at Art in America magazine, where he compiled its monthly art newsletter and later became the magazine's News Editor. In the late 1970s, Robinson began painting the pulp romance imagery he is known for, showing his work in galleries in New York's East Village and internationally. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Robinson's work, with recent shows in Paris and New York. 

Adam Parker Smith, born in California in 1978, graduating with a MFA from Tyler School of Art and Skowhegan Shool of Painting and Sculpture, now lives and works in Brooklyn. Working primarily as 3-dimentionally, Smith creates faux objects by appropriating from mass culture or others' art works. Smith has exhibited work nationally and internationally, and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum, the New York Times and the New Yorker.

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